In general I find the VRT's science reporting is really solid (easily better than the BBC's, for instance), and I recently moved to Wallonia and kind of expected the same high standards from the RTBF.

What I've seen so far, however, is pretty bad. Just a few egregious examples I want to get off my chest.

Yesterday the RTBF app headlined this spectacular quotemine:

"Les effets secondaires sont de plus en plus documentés", le ministre wallon de la Santé confirme les problèmes cardiaques liés à la vaccination contre le coronavirus

Seriously, that as the featured article on the front page? A massive antivaxxy headline to an article that contains no new information but is somehow dressed up like a bomb-shell? Really top journalistic standards there.

A few months ago they published this. Another embarrassing piece of nonsense. Full of hackneyed antivax talking points, including a toe-curlingly dreadful presentation of pharmacovigilance statistics as if they were causal vaccine side-effects. A frankly amazing thing for a public broadcaster to disseminate.

Anyone else noticed this difference? And I'm wondering, given that they're both public broadcasters, what does the VRT do to be so much better than the RTBF?

by Mr_Two_Shoes

5 comments

  1. I would assume vrt relies on english reports. Giving them more to report on and more details.

    Rtbf probably stays in the Francosphere which has studies of their own but in far less numbers. The big studies from abroad have to be first translated in french, with biases added by people who aren’t the reporters, and are often downsized to summeries in the process.

  2. Science-based narratives are much less prevalent in Francophone territories, see the vaccine debate in Wallonia and France. However I do not know why this is.

  3. Speaking in broad terms, France is more antivax, and generally less science minded and more prone to pseudoscientific nonsense than Flanders. And you know what they say, when it rains in Paris, it drips in Brussels.

  4. The answer is unfortunately that those kind of headlines are making far much more noises in the French-speaking community that the equivalent would in dutch-speaking ones.

    Worse thing is RTBF is actually one of the good students in that regard, but if you look at something like sudinfo, you’ll quickly lose faith in humanity

  5. There are a few beacons of light at RTBF who do solid scientific reporting. Look for what Johanne Montay does, for example

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